Bluffing Bill Gates

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If you are worried about the cost of your software licences
there is a solution: announce loudly and regularly that you are
interested in moving to Linux. Which is what Newham Borough Council
has been doing for several months now, raising an implicit (and
explicit) threat to Microsofts presence in that particular
part of the public sector. The end result has been a bit of a
winner for Newham  in the form of a new
partnership with Microsoft that is cutting its software
costs by £3.2 million over a five-year period. As
Newhams head of ICT noted at the launch of this new deal, the
threat from Linux was clearly an enabler in getting this kind of
hefty price cut. Youd be insane to think
otherwise, he said. Well quite. So are we now about to enter
a period of bluff and double bluff between suppliers and users?
Cut my prices Vendor A or Ill jump ship to Vendor
B...go on, I mean it...no, really I do...Im serious, look
into my eyes...oh bugger, OK I wont. You need to be
prepared to make the leap before you start to throw threats around.
Newham insists it was genuinely interested in what open source had
to offer. It supports this claim with an independent study
conducted by professional services firm Capgemini that purports to
show that the total cost of moving Newhams existing NT4,
Office and 130 bespoke applications onto a modern Microsoft
platform was 68 per cent lower than the cost of switching to open
source. Open source evangelists will of course jump up and down in
horror at such claims and produce their own counter-claims, but the
lesson to be learned from Newham is simple. In the game of software
licence poker, Microsoft will blink eventually  you just need
to hold your nerve.

Calling IT a day
How times have changed. Once upon a time, not so long ago, Oracle
and Ford Motor Company had a big mutual love in. As part of the
dot-com hysteria, when we all thought online global marketplaces
were a groovy idea, the biggest and grooviest of them all was
Covisint. It was an automotive components marketplace and among its
prime movers were Oracle and Ford. But in late summer Ford
confirmed long standing industry rumours and canned a four-year-old
procurement project built around Oracle software despite spending
millions of dollars trying to get it up and running. Now the car
firm has decided to switch its purchasing operations back to the
mainframe applications the new systems were intended to replace. It
is a big decision for any company to can a high-profile project in
mid-course. There comes a point when throwing good money after bad
makes no sense to anyone, but fear of admitting failure causes
organisations to plough on regardless. It is meat and drink to many
systems houses  how many seemingly never ending, but never
quite completed ERP implementations put food on the corporate table
at Accenture, EDS et al during the 1990s. Killing a project
mid-stream is never easy, but Ford deserves kudos for being
prepared to stand up and say enough is enough. If more enterprise
users told vendors about the shortcomings of their products, then
perhaps we would be part of the way down the road to breaking the
cycle of hype and over hype.

US leading the world
Ploughing through the daily influx of offers for penis enlargement,
free trials of Viagra and news of an unclaimed fortune waiting for
me in a Nigerian bank account, I stumbled across an interesting
snippet from a study into the origins of spam. It turns out that
according to a survey by CipherTrust, while US internet protocol
addresses make up only 28 per cent of the spam-sending addresses,
those addresses sent out 86 per cent of the worlds
unsolicited commercial email. According to the survey, three per
cent of spam came from South Korea, two per cent was from Canada
and about 1.5 per cent came from Ukraine. Of the IP addresses
sending spam, 23 per cent were from China and Hong Kong, and
another four per cent from Brazil. So now you know  not only
are you getting unwanted offers, you probably cant take
advantage of them without owning a US billing address
for your credit card.

Staying power
Following on from the collapse in Salesforce.coms share price
and the subsequent collective gloating from fiscally-unimpressive
other CRM vendors about one trick ponies, it is interesting to note
the stunning silence that followed Salesforce.coms
second-quarter earnings announcement: revenue up 84 per cent, net
income up 859 per cent. Okay, the absolute numbers are far, far
smaller than those of a player such as Siebel or Oracle or SAP, but
I think we might usefully conclude those rumours of an early demise
were more than a little exaggerated...